A contemporary art installation featuring a large, multi-layered sculpture hangs within a light-filled corridor of a building. The ceiling is clad in wood panelling.
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Jakob Rowlinson: ROTATOR

– YSP Centre

About Jakob Rowlinson: ROTATOR

ROTATOR is Jakob Rowlinson’s first institutional project, presented as an installation in our Visitor Centre and a solo exhibition, REVIVER at The Art House in Wakefield, having developed from a 2024 collaborative residency between both organisations. Spanning across the two venues, this new body of work weaves together complex material histories, explores the ecology of the Park's landscape, and continues the artist’s interest in queering the archive. Throughout this body of work, Rowlinson weaves together ecological, folkloric and spiritual references. 

Suspended above the Visitor Centre concourse, ROTATOR features three colourful and intricate leather sculptures. The sculptures are inspired by the native orange-tip and comma butterflies Rowlinson observed at YSP and Rowlinson aligns their transformative journeys of fluidity and metamorphosis with queer experience. 

The patterns on the leather that look like butterfly markings were drawn using handmade oak-gall dyes foraged from trees within the Park. These markings reference Yorkshire’s historic importance in the leather tanning industry. Parts of the sculptures are made from reclaimed leather garments that carry stories of the bodies that wore them. Leather is also used to acknowledge the material's long association with LGBTQIA+ subculture. 

ROTATOR coincides with Rowlinson’s solo exhibition REVIVER at The Art House on display 18 July – 12 September 2026.

Consultant, curator and writer Jon Horrocks has written an essay to accompany ROTATOR and REVIVER, Jakob Rowlinson: the act of becoming. Read the essay here. 

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